Making Glow in the Dark Gooey Slime

Project Learn and Grow- Glow in the Dark Gooey Slime

All You Need:

• 2 Elmer's white glue bottles
• 3-4 Tablespoons glow in the dark paint
• Water
• Food coloring
• 1 teaspoon borax
• 1/2 cup warm water

Step one: Pour the white Elmer’s glue into a bowl. Fill the empty bottles with warm water, place the lids back on and shake the bottles (this will help remove any remaining glue inside the bottle and make it easy to measure your water). Pour the watery glue into the bowl and mix with a spoon.
Step two: At this point you want to add food coloring to your glue

Step three: Stir in the glow in the dark paint into your glue mixture.

Step four: In a small bowl mix 1/2 cup of warm water with 1 teaspoon of Borax (the warm water will help dissolve the borax).

Step five: Mix the borax water and glue mixture together with a spoon, but but don’t be afraid to use your hands to fully mix the two together.

The special ingredient that makes the glue turn into slime is the borax. Play around with the amount to get the perfect consistency, if you prefer a runny slime use less borax. Also, when you first began mixing the glue and borax water the slime will be VERY runny and a weird texture, don’t freak out! The more you play with it the better the consistency will turn out.

The kids loved playing with it and helping me mix it all together.  I have tried this before and it didn't work, but this recipe worked perfectly.  

We took it to a dark room and made sure it could glow.  

The kids love doing experiments like this.  It is one thing to buy this from the store, but to see the kids reactions when they help make it is so fun.  

Giraffes and Ghosts

Letter G- Making giraffes out of a hand print

All You Need:

• Paint
• Paper

My kids love paint.  It's not my favorite item to be played with, but sometimes I allow it so they can be happy.  Cody's favorite animal is a giraffe so I thought this would be a perfect activity for them.  We got some paint that we wanted for the giraffe and dipped our hand in it.  Put the hand print on the paper so the fingers turn into the legs of the giraffe.  For the the neck of the giraffe we just drew with the index finger a line and put our thumbprint as the head.  Then we got the dots and dipped the tip of our finger in gold paint and made dots all over the giraffe.  Finish it up with some eyes, ears, and let it dry.

Cotton balls and Ghosts

All You Need:

• Paper
• Cotton balls
• Glue

It's Halloween time so we made ghosts.  The kids loved these and they played around the house for a long time with them.  I cut a ghost shape out of white paper and the kids glued cotton balls all over the paper.  Then we took black foam paper, but regular black paper could also be used and we made eyed and a mouth and it turned into a ghost.  Such a simple activity that kids will love making and playing with.  

Fast Explosions

Project Learn and Grow
Fast Explosions with Soda

All you Need

• Diet soda
• Mentos

The kids love explosions so I thought this one would be simple and fun.  I found out people use Diet soda so it's less sticky.  I wanted to do and experiment and use diet soda and some regular soda and see which one works best.  The kids picked out grape and orange for the regular soda.  The diet soda worked the best.  It wasn't as big of an explosion as I thought it would be, but the kids loved it.

The grape soda was barely an explosion.

The orange soda got a little bigger then the grape, but still not a lot of fun.  Our conclusion was the diet soda works the best.

Fish and Finger Puppets

 Letter F

All you need

• A letter F 
• Little fish

We just cut out a bunch of little fish and glued them onto the letter F.  After they were all done gluing the boys colored the fish to make it look nice.
Monster Finger Puppets

 All you need

• Pipe cleaners
• Pom poms
• Plastic eyes
• Glue gun
• Scissors

We just wrapped the pipe cleaners around our fingers and then glued the pom poms on the tip of the pipe cleaner and glued the eyes on.  When everything is dried put them on your finger and play.

Project Learn and Grow

Bouncing and Shrinking Eggs

Today we experimented with eggs.  I have seen a lot of pins on pinterest about how to make eggs bounce so we had to try it.  

All you need:

• Eggs
• Vinegar
• Corn syrup
• Water
• Food Coloring
• Sugar

We started out soaking the eggs in vinegar for 1-2 days.  We just put the eggs in a bowl and made sure they were covered with water.  We soaked them for 2 days and the eggs shells came right off and dissolved in the vinegar.  Then you can lightly bounce them on the counter top.  You need to be very careful doing this or they will break.  Just the outside is bouncy.  Colin got a little excited and broke a couple of eggs.  

Next we took a bowl of just water and a bowl of water with lots of sugar in it and wanted to see which one floated and which one sank.  The kids loved seeing how the egg floated in the sugar water and the egg sank in just water.  

Then we decided to color the egg that we shrank so we stuck it in a bowl of water and green food coloring.  This just takes 30 minutes to get it a decent color.  Then we put it in the bowl of corn syrup and let it sit for 24 hours.  The next morning it was a shrunken egg.  

To make the egg big and bouncy again we put it into a bowl of water and after 2 hours it was back to it's bouncy size.  

This was really fun for the kids.  They loved seeing how much the egg changed everyday.  

Elephants and Counting Candy Corn

Letter E
Elephants

All you need

• Paper Bag
• Blue, white, and brown construction paper

We did the letter E today.  We started out tracing the letter E and then we made these elephant puppets. I cut out the ears, trunk, and eyes for the elephant.  The boys glued on everything and it was done.  A hand puppet elephant that the kids love to chase each other with.

Counting Candy Corn
All you need

• Orange and white paper
• Candy corn

Since it's October I wanted to do a simple Halloween counting activity.  I just cut orange pumpkins out of paper and glued them to the white paper.  Then I decorated it so they looked like pumpkins and put numbers on them.  We just did 1-6, but next time I think I will do 11-20.  Cody is really good at 1-10.  I just wanted to see how they liked this activity.  They loved it especially since there was candy involved.  Candy Corn Men
All you need

• White, orange, yellow, and brown paper
• Glue

I cut a big candy corn shape out of the brown paper and drew 2 lines on it to have an outline of candy corn.  Then we ripped up the yellow, orange, and white paper.  the kids glued the little pieces of paper all over the brown paper to look like candy corn.  I cut out 2 stripes of brown paper and folded it like and accordion for the legs and arms.  Then I cut out some hands, feet and eyes that the kids glued on.  With everything all glued on it they turned out like candy corn men.

What Dissolves?

Project Learn and Grow
What Dissolves? 

All you need

• Glass jars
• Water 
• Anything you want to see if it dissolves

For project learn and grow day we wanted to see what dissolves in water.  I just grabbed a bunch of items from our pantry and filled the glass jars halfway with water.  One by one we tested each item.  We used cinnamon sticks, sugar, rice, red hots, oatmeal, raisins, baking soda, and salt.  The kids thought everything would dissolve and loved stirring the items.

Density
All you need

• A glass jar
• Honey, karo syrup, dish soap, water, vegetable, rubbing alcohol, lamp oil.  
• Food Coloring

We measured out each liquid into 8 oz each.  Then we poured each liquid into the jar slowly and in the center so it didn't touch the sides.  We colored the liquids that had no color.  This is where we messed up.  Be careful about what colors are next to each other.  We had blue and purple right next to each other so the center part looks like one big dark color.  The kids could still see the liquids sitting on top of each other, but for the picture it didn't work so well.

The kids liked this one, but it was a little hard trying to get them to not pour the liquids since we needed it to be slow.  I want to try it again with different colors.

Donuts and Dinosaurs

Letter D Donuts

                   

The letter D is one of the funniest letters for my kids.  We worked with donuts and dinosaurs and had a blast.  We got a bunch of donut holes and put them all around the letter D and then we ate a few after we were done.
I let the boys pick out their favorite donut and on the way home they couldn't help but to eat them.  Cody took bites out of his so it formed the letter D.
Dinosaur Footprints

All you need:

• Paint
• Paper
• Dinosaurs

We just dipped the dinosaurs feet in paint and put the feet on the paper.  The kids got too much paint on the feet so there are some big footprints, but after putting the dinosaurs feet on the paper a few times they formed some good prints.

I forgot how much they like dinosaurs so now I want plan a trip to the Dinosaur Museum that is near us.
Shapes, Stickers, and Dinosaur Cards

We also did an activity on shapes.  They just stuck stickers all around the different shapes.  Cody wanted some shapes to have more stickers then other shapes.  While we were doing that I got the dinosaur cards and read them all of the fun information about the different dinosaurs to them.